Online terrorists

Created
Fri, 31/03/2023 - 07:30
Updated
Fri, 31/03/2023 - 07:30
There is no bottom After reading a bunch of filthy transphobe garbage on twitter yesterday and already feeling queasy, I came across this. I need to take a shower and have a stiff drink. It is just so horrible: My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger. My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse. But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.” I’m a North Carolina–based journalist who specializes in countering misinformation on social media. I know that Twitter, Facebook, and other networks amplify bad information; that their algorithms feed on anger and division; that anonymity and distance bring out the worst in some people online. And yet I had never anticipated that anyone would mock and terrorize…